I Made Systems When I Was at My Best That Work on Me When I'm at My Worst
On broken glass, bad days, and the parts of this job that don't need me to feel anything about them.
Everything I picked up yesterday wanted to end up on the floor. A jar broke the day before. Then half a liter of homemade beer went straight out of the fridge and turned into more glass pieces than half a liter of anything should be able to produce.
At some point in the middle of cleaning it up, I caught myself narrating it in a stupid third-person voice — "Wow, you obviously don't have enough work. You've created some more! Woohoo!" — which is a ridiculous thing to do and also, somehow, exactly what got me through the rest of the day. It puts a little distance between me and the frustration. I can be annoyed and laugh at how absurd it is and still deal with the glass, at the same time.
What Kept Moving Anyway
The production still moved forward. Not because I felt like it — because a system I built on a better day was still running without me needing to feel anything about it.
It also rained most of the day, and the temperature finally dropped, which meant the primer on everything I'd airbrushed was going to take longer to dry than usual. I didn't mind. I'm much more alive when I can actually exist and work without being cooked by summer heat — a slower dry felt like a fair trade for being able to think again.
I can mold things when I actually feel like molding. Then, later, when I don't feel like it at all, I can finish things that were already molded — sitting there half-done, primed, waiting for whichever version of me shows up next. I'm building a queue of prepared work on purpose. It means I get to work with the process instead of being forced to complete one entire piece from beginning to end every single time, in one sitting, on one mood.
Sand the pieces. Finish the studs. Prime the pieces. Follow the system.
None of that requires inspiration. It doesn't require me to be excited, or creative, or even particularly present. Some of it is just willpower, applied to a system that doesn't ask how I'm feeling before it lets me use it.
The Same Attention, Pointed at the Boring Parts
It's the same brain that can't stop noticing the mechanism behind a flower, whether that's useful that day or not. Most of the time that attention is the whole reason any of this looks the way it does. On a day like yesterday, it's also the reason I had a system solid enough to run on fumes.
I genuinely love how much I've learned building it. I made these systems when I had the capacity to think clearly and plan ahead. Now they're the thing helping me on the days I don't have either. That might be one of the most useful things I've built so far — more useful, some days, than anything I've actually made with my hands.
Everything that came out of that queue, on good days and bad, ends up in the shop.
Handmade in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Small numbered series, shipped across the EU.